Judges and lawyers within the American legal system, as well as many others across the globe, are continually researching an ever-expanding body of legislation and judicial opinions to assist them understanding and resolving new or potential disputes. To facilitate this research, companies, such as West Publishing Company of St. Paul, Minn. (doing business as Thomson West), collect legal statutes, judicial opinions, law articles, and other legal and non-legal materials and make these available electronically over a computer network, through the Westlaw™ online research system. (Westlaw is a trademark licensed to Thomson West.)
At least one problem the present inventors recognized with this powerful system as well as other online research systems is that their valuable functionality is highly segregated from the functionality of other computer applications. For instance, legal researchers typically use results of their online legal research as part of a larger process of producing documents, such as legal briefs and memoranda. However, systems, such as the Westlaw system, are typically functionally separated from popular word processing applications, such as Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect, that are used for creating these documents.
Although adds-ons such as West BriefTools™ software and West CiteLink™ software are available to identify, mark, verify, tabulate, link, and/or indicate status of legal citations in word processor documents, their functionality is isolated to legal citations. This means that for other types of legal informational needs users must leave the context of the word-processing application to execute searches via browsers or other search tools and then cut and paste information from their browsers or other search interfaces into the documents. Moreover, the inventors recognized that conventional techniques for expanding the functionality of word-processing applications using customized add-ons requires adding fully customized software to the computer hosting the word-processing application. This approach, however, is inefficient as an information services company, such as Thomson Reuters, wants to offer a growing set of add-ons, such as West BriefTools and WestCiteLink software, to its customers.
Accordingly, the present inventors have recognized at least a need for improving functional integration of information-retrieval systems, such as Westlaw, into other applications, such as word processors.